Bach on the Piano
Sta,—Your correspondent who is so certain that Bach should be played only on• a harpsichord or a clavichord, and not ever on a pianoforte, hardly meets your music critic's point. Of course, there is always room for scholarship, and we are as grateful to the manufac- turers of these old instruments as we are to researchers in eighteenth- century methods. But because we know about apron stages and have work constantly going on in things Shakespearean, we do not allow ourselves to be offended by productions behind proscenium arches and in an English dialect not Shakespeare's. It is not laziness; it is that we like to have the great works of the past given us in the same manner as the work of our contemporaries. There is something which attitudinises, which jars the imagination, which forbids the listener losing himself in the masterpiece before him, if there is too much scholarship. So Euripides in English at the Wells, Bach on the pianoforte and the Bible in new translations. Each time we thus get to see new truths in old masterpieces. And-all this without damaging the original texts, which are still there, thanks to careful scholars like your correspondent.—Yours faithfully,
MAX KENYON. Humes Farmhouse, Church Lane, Hutton, Brentwood, Essex.
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